IT downtime can cost businesses on average $9,000 per minute, or $540,000 per hour, according to a 2016 study by Ponemon Institute. Think it won’t happen to you? Think again.
With thousands, if not millions, of dollars on the line, it’s imperative to closely examine your service level agreement (SLA) when choosing your ISP. Ninety-nine percent uptime sounds great, but it means you’ve agreed to up to 87.66 hours of annual unplanned downtime. At GeoLinks , we guarantee 99.999% uptime, which promises no more than 5.25 minutes of unplanned downtime throughout the year.
Nearly half (46%) of companies experienced more than four hours of downtime over 12 months, with estimated costs ranging from $12,000 to more than $1 million per hour, according to a 2017 study of 400 IT decision makers. While this number may seem high, keep in mind that Delta airlines was forced to cancel 280 flights due to an outage in 2017, with losses exceeding $150 million.
So What’s the Solution
Guaranteed five 9s uptime is a great place to start. But you can take business continuity a step further by incorporating SD-WAN into your planning.
SD-WAN (or Software-defined Wide Area Networking) can ensure connectivity in the event your primary circuit fails by using at least two circuits for every connection. The secondary connection can be on standby and kick in when the primary fails or in more critical scenarios, SD-WAN also gives you the option use connections simultaneously so that if one drops, your application doesn’t.
SD-WAN can work with your private networks or widely available low-cost broadband. And, with the ability to combine up to four internet connections, SD-WAN can boost your bandwidth cost-effectively.
So while you may have heard that 100% uptime is not realistic, with strong SLAs and SD-WAN, network downtime truly can be a thing of the past. And with the high cost associated with network downtime, SD-WAN’s cost-effectiveness makes it a no-brainer as a solution for your business.
